Earlier in 2026, our Association informed the UN Working Group on Peasants for its thematic report on the right to seeds.
Relevant submission, prepared by Eduard Pleshko, Anna Prykhodko, and other experts and published on the official UN web sources now, described the challenges to the right to seeds and seedlings, regarding the effects of armed conflicts, such as Russian aggression and occupation of the territories of Ukraine, with relevant Crimean examples.
We reminded Working Group that Russian aggression against Ukraine violates almost all articles of UN Declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas, including the right to seeds, right to means of agricultural production due to its destruction and confiscation, right to information due to misinformation and propaganda, freedom to determine price and market for agricultural production due to confiscation, “nationalization” and scams, right to biological diversity and to preserve the environment, due to Russia-committed ecocide in Ukraine’s rural areas, and right to have access to justice.
The ARC’s submission pointed out that the right to seeds is violated by Russian occupying “authorities”, as they have banned, since 2014, local farmers and small businesses in Russia-occupied Crimea and the East of Ukraine from using seeds and seedlings produced and certified by the Ukrainian or European Union agrarian sector. At the same time, Russian occupying “authorities” allowed affiliated gross agrarian businesses to carry seedlings from Europe to Crimea for horticulture and viticulture, but those processes stopped in 2022.
The ARC’s submission added that maintaining the current vineyard acreage in the occupied Crimea is impossible with Crimean and Russian seedlings, as they are simply in short supply, and the Russian ones are of poor quality. So-called “CEO” of the Crimean enterprise “Magarach,” Vladimir Likhovskoy, complained about this, saying that the aggressor doesn’t “subsidize imported planting material” and that “Russian planting structures only provide 20-25% of the required amount.”
The ARC’s submission stressed that low-quality, low-volume production of seedlings is connected with total corruption in that area, and transferring seedlings from the Asian part of Russia to the Crimea led to the introduction of dangerous insect pests to the peninsula. We added that in 2025, the fake occupiers’ “Ministry of Agriculture” in Crimea announced to the public the “official reason” for the rising prices of key food products as a shortage of “vegetable seeds, including borscht seed stock and melons,” with the situation “most acute” for potatoes and carrots.
Moreover, all systems of the agrarian sector in modern Crimea are totally ineffective and caused broad-scale growth of prices on basic food products, our submission summarized.
